I've played Morrowind using OpenMW a lot. From where I am, OpenMW really does seem fully playable. It's easy to go hunting for bugs in OpenMW because I'm really just having fun playing the game when i spot something.

OpenCS is trickier. I found out that you can't change faction ranks because I had an idea to do something and couldn't do it. But the number of hours I spend making a mod is very small compared to the number of hours I spend playing the game and besides that, i won't have every different idea for how to use CS. So that makes bug hunting sort of difficult and I bet a lot of people who play OpenMW don't bother with CS much if at all.

So how can we hunt for bugs to find problems? Opening mods in ESP format and saving them as a native OpenMW format doesn't qualify because we aren't really engaging with the editor in this way. Therefore, I want to use a different idea which might not be very fun at first but hopefully it will teach us all a lot about how both the TES3CS works and OpenCS works.

I plan to take a mod in ESP format and open it with TES3CS running under Wine. Then I'll look at what was edited and try to find every edit possible. Then I will attempt to recreate that mod with OpenCS from scratch. Since I don't know how to make new assets, I'll have to just use whatever new assets the mod provides. I think doing it this way will eventually expose what I can and can not fully edit and recreate with the new editor and how much of a hassle doing certain things are. Maybe I'll even get good with the editor and will be able to make all kinds of interesting mods in the future.

I plan to post here a running list of each mod that I have either successfully recreated or not recreated. I don't plan to actually release the new mod as It would be better for everyone to just get the original and acknowledge the work of the original mod creator. I just want to post success or failure and what I learned in the process.

Admittedly this might be a slow and tedious process with a learning curve but I think it's worth it right now. Maybe with better bug reports for the editor more developers will turn their attention to making it better.

Also, if anyone else would like to do the same thing or have already recreated any mods from scratch I invite you all to post those results here so we can all share what we found out.

It's a good idea and you have my thanks for committing that time to testing. This will also allow you to post valuable feedback for design decisions as a user of the program, write tutorials etc. Thumbs up.

Thanks for the positive feedback. Currently I'm looking through nexus to find some small mods to try out first. If anyone has any suggested mods you want me or anyone else to start with, please list it here. I hope to have the first couple of mods to report on maybe by Morndas ... Ahem ... I mean, Monday.